Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn: Marked and unbound
August 4, 2008 at 3:04 pm by David Lee Simmons in A&E
When I saw Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn’s artwork — first on her MySpace page and later at the 4 on the Floor reception — I was struck by her dark and moody images all stained with coffee and cigarettes. The women in her work often seem to be looking beyond themselves and their confines, sometimes at the viewer, sometimes off into the distance, maybe looking for something better. Blinkhorn attended the reception under difficult circumstances: Her brother, Gerald, had in the past two weeks succumbed to spinal muscular atrophy, the same form of muscular dystrophy that has confined Jessica to a wheelchair.
Tonight, in the upstairs lounge of Midtown’s Artistry, the Kennesaw native gets out of her chair to pay homage to her late brother with her performance-art piece MARKED, in which she will be lifted in the air and placed on a 5-by-5-foot canvas where she will “mark” areas with black paint.
This is how she puts it:
We all wish we could rewrite the world. When we realize this is not possible, we then begin to define ourselves in this world. We MARK those around us and are MARKED by the world we inhabit … Let the MARKING begin as I define myself through my art … .
The hour-long performance begins at 8 p.m., followed by a Q&A session. This will be her last week before Jessica turns her focus to the fall semester, in which the grad student will teach an art class at Georgia State.
(”Ponder” by Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn)
Leave a Reply